Chapter 37
NASH
When I get home from practice, I find Piper rummaging around the shed in the backyard.
“Boo,” I try to startle her when I peep into the shed to find her back facing me, but she doesn’t flinch.
“I heard your truck pull up and you’re not sneaky,” she says breezily, not even turning to face me.
I huff a chuckle. “You sure know how to keep a guy’s ego in check.”
“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me.” She turns around, pointing to what I noticed sitting outside the open shed door. “What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s the ATV I bought when I moved here,” I answer. “Never really used it much, though. Got too busy too quick after settling in.”
“It’s still charged,” she says. “When I tried to see if it ran, it almost went through the wall.”
I sigh. “I should expect that you’d almost knock over various structures if I leave you alone for too long.”
She just flashes me a cheeky grin, and it makes my heart skip.
She walks past me, and when she’s out of the dark and under the light of the sun, I notice what she’s wearing, and my blood thickens.
Cut-off jean short shorts that show off her long, tanned legs. My eyes feast on the sight of her thighs, lips itching to know how it would feel to drag across them, my mouth moving slowly to their apex.
But it’s when I notice what’s on the other end of her legs, that I really feel my cock pulse.
“You …” I swallow thickly. “Got new boots.”
She’s wearing a pair of damn cowboy boots, brown leather adorned with intricate floral designs. My jaw immediately sets hard, teeth pressing together, and an intensity rushes through me that has me flexing my hands by my sides just to maintain composure.
Piper wearing a pair of cowboy boots, cut-off shorts, and a white tank top that makes the round, firm swell of her tits only too noticeable is downright torture for my self-control.
“Can I ride it?”
My muscles coil at Piper’s choice of words. The wind punches out of my lungs. “What?” I practically cough the question, feeling like I’ve been body checked.
“Can. I. Ride. It?” Piper repeats each word, as if that’s not going to make my brain short-circuit even more. “The ATV,” she adds after a long beat of discombobulated silence.
“Oh,” I scramble. “Uh. Yeah, sure. But be safe.”
She looks off into the rolling grassland that expands past the house, the horizon dancing under the sharp, hot rays of the sun.
“It’s so sunny, though,” Piper says, shielding her eyes with her hand. “Oh, I have a great idea.”
She walks up to me and snatches my baseball cap right off my head, tugging it down on hers.
My jaw falls open at the sight of my wife wearing my hat, her wavy brown hair spilling from underneath the brim. Electric current sizzles through my veins.
Cowboy boots, cut-off shorts, and my fucking hat on her head. It’s a miracle I don’t pass out on the spot.
Luckily, she turns around before I make a flagpole in my pants. She swings her shapely leg around the seat of the ATV, straddling it, and a sharp pang twists at the base of my balls.
My brain might be jelly in my head right now, but I have enough self-awareness to call out, “Be safe,” as she starts the engine.
She shoots me a thumbs-up before taking off, plumes of dust rising in the wake as she rides away, exuding a cowgirl energy that turns me on way, way too much.
I get back home late that night, after attending a team dinner at Cooper’s house. It’s a monthly ritual Cooper initiated as team captain in the middle of last season, and, honestly, it probably played a hand in how much our chemistry and teamwork improved afterward.
It’s not mandatory or anything, but the six of us—Cooper, Vaughn, Adriano, Hayden, Noah, and myself—all go every month as a good example to encourage the rest of the team to join us. There’s usually a good turnout, and tonight was no exception.
When I get inside, I don’t take notice of the fact that Piper isn’t on the couch. I don’t take notice of the fact that her bedroom door is wide open and she’s clearly not there, either. Nor does it register to me that the bathroom door is closed.
Without mentally noting any of those facts or thinking about their implication, I simply go right to the bathroom and pull the door open.
But the sight that’s in front of me? Yeah, I notice that. As a matter of fact, nothing in the world exists to me other than what my eyes are pointed at right now.
The breath is trapped in my throat, my heart has skipped a medically distressing number of beats, and there’s no way I could even add two one-digit numbers together right now.
Because I’m looking at Piper in her bathtub, her perfect tits and pointed pink nipples on full display as she sits reclined in it.
Her mouth is open, her lips an alluring, soft circle of surprise as she looks back at me.
My wife is naked in front of me, and my sanity hangs by the flimsiest, thinnest thread in existence.
Every detail of her is immediately burned into my brain. Her tits are literally the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen in my life, covered with a light dusting of soapy bubbles.
The surface of the bathwater is bubbly, but from where I’m standing, I can still see the blurry, opaque glow of the rest of her naked body beneath it.
“Well, now who’s waiting for an invite?”
The sound of her voice opens the floodgates in my brain, reality rushing back in. I just barged in on Piper in the tub, and I’ve been standing here gawking at her for who knows how long.
“Sorry,” I grunt out, the sound a strangled growl in my throat. I step out and close the door behind me, and it’s then that I’m able to breathe.
Guilt starts to kick in my brain. Did I really just not notice that Piper was nowhere to be seen in this small house?
Did it really just not occur to me that the bathroom door was closed?
Despite what happened when she walked in on me, and the fact that we’ve both been opening doors with extra caution ever since?
Or did a part of me, a dirty, greedy part … want what just happened to happen?
A reproachful feeling twists through my guts at how possible that feels.
I pace back and forth through the living room, feeling the gnawing of guilt in my chest, trying to control the hormones raging through me like a hurricane.
Then I hear the bathroom door open behind me, and my chest hitches.
“Nash, we should talk.”
I turn around and instantly wish I hadn’t. Piper wears nothing but a white towel wrapped under her arms, covering the bare minimum of her legs. Her hair is wet and plastered to the side of her neck, water still clinging to her exposed skin.
“Talk?” I blurt out. “About what? The news?”
No one in the history of the world has ever done a worse job at trying to avoid a topic than I just did.
Piper narrows her eyes at me, though there’s a hint of amusement sparking in them. “Nash, you just saw my soapy tits and now I’m standing in your living room wearing nothing but a towel. No, I don’t want to talk about the news.”
My jaw pops as I fight back a groan. When she literally mentions them, it’s impossible for the sight of those soapy tits not to blare in my imagination.
“Nash, we’re both adults. I think we can handle a conversation about the … tension we’ve been living with lately.”
“Tension?” I ask. Many, many points may have just been shaved off my IQ by what I just saw. But even with that being the case, I do a bad job of sounding stupid, like I didn’t understand her obvious implication.
So, she makes herself impossible to misunderstand. “The sexual tension.”
“I … we …” This conversation feels like a powder keg, and I don’t know which way to step.
“We’ve still got at least four months left of living together. Neither of us needs an extra source of stress in our lives by having to deal with it every time we’re at home, where we should be able to relax.”
Is she going to propose moving out? Panic spreads through me. The very thought of going back to spending night after night in this house without her in it … I know that’s in my future no matter what, but, damn it, I don’t want it to come this soon.
“There’s an easy solution to this problem, too,” she continues.
I’m trying to think of what to say to make sure she doesn’t move out without giving away how desperate I am, but she quickly makes that unnecessary by saying the last thing I expected.
“We should just sleep together.”
I feel like I would’ve been more prepared to take a cannonball to the chest than to hear what Piper just said to me.
All I’d have to do right now is nod my head yes, tug that towel off Piper’s body, carry her to my bed, and I’d finally be able to do what I’ve wanted to do more than anything else in the world for the last two fucking months.
But if Piper and I get physical, and for the next couple months we’re not only living together, but sleeping together …
I feel like if I get used to that, and then she leaves after we hit the six-month deadline, I might be crushed. Destroyed.
In the middle of the season. I’d be another one of those sad examples of players who get divorced and let it tank their season, like the guys were talking about.
A broken heart and ruining a season that should be a golden path right to the Stanley Cup. I’m not signing myself up for that, even if every single cell in my body is screaming at me to say yes. To finally take Piper the way I’ve wanted to for so damn long.
“No,” is all I say.
Hurt flashes in Piper’s eyes, the sting of rejection. I feel like a bigger piece of shit than I ever have in my life, which frankly covers too much ground.
But the look washes away quickly, replaced by a more searching expression. It’s like she’s taking the measure of me, recalling the way I’ve been looking at her lately, including gawking at her perky tits for an obscene amount of time just minutes ago.
“Why not?” she answers, a challenge in her question.
“It’s …” I gulp. “It’s not a good idea.”
“I think us fucking right now would be a great idea, actually.”
I shut my eyes and tilt my head upward, like I’m searching for supernatural aid to keep the white-hot desire winding through me in check.
“Piper …” I don’t know what else to say.
“Come on, what’s the worst that could happen? We’re both going crazy with frustration, we can’t escape each other in a small place like this, and we have months more of it to live through. We might as well add some benefits to this fake marriage.”
The worst that could happen is I get way, way too attached and my heart shatters into a million pieces when she leaves.
The most dangerous thing I could possibly do is fall in love with my wife. If we were sleeping together, falling asleep in the same bed, and waking up with our limbs tangled together every morning, I have a bad feeling that that’s exactly what would happen.
“Tell me right now you don’t feel the chemistry between us,” she says. The demand is a challenge, like we’re playing chess and she just moved a piece that all but guarantees her victory.
“I don’t.” The words are a lie. Such a brazen lie that if I’d had more than a split-second to think about them, I wouldn’t have dared utter them.
She narrows her eyes distrustfully. “You don’t? That’s why you just ogled my tits for about five minutes straight?”
“I … was surprised. Caught off guard. That’s all.”
She takes two steps toward me, the air between us practically sizzling with unstable electricity. An errant spark could engulf this room in flames.
“So, the way you’ve been looking at me lately is all in my head?” Her tone is borderline cocky. Like she knows I’m full of shit, and all it’ll take is a couple extra prods for me to let the facade crumble.
But she doesn’t know that if I let this facade crumble, if I give in, I’m signing up for heartbreak and misery like I’ve never felt before. Far worse than what I experienced when my engagement with Bridgett blew up.
“I guess it must be,” I lie again.
A displeased and disbelieving expression curls on her face. She sizes me up for a long stretch of time … but then she just shrugs.
“My mistake then,” she says, but every syllable drips with offended disbelief.
She walks briskly to her room and closes the door behind her with a firm thud.
But I’m left feeling like this issue isn’t even close to settled.